1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an address book central administration apparatus that centrally administers address books stored in a plurality of image processing apparatuses connected to the address book central administration apparatus via a network, an address book creation method of the address book central administration apparatus, and a computer readable recording medium having a program recorded therein to make a computer execute processing.
2. Description of the Related Art
The following description sets forth the inventor's knowledge of related art and problems therein and should not be construed as an admission of knowledge in the prior art.
For recent years, the spread of networks has brought MFPs (Multi Function Peripherals) such as multifunctional digital image forming apparatuses, to each area in companies, offices and other places. And now, people more often interconnect the plurality of MFPs via a network such as LAN, in order to transmit image data read out by one of the MFPs via the network, to another one of the MFPs or a predetermined destination.
To facilitate use of the MFPs employed in such an environment, each of the MFPs stores in itself address books including destination data pieces. And when a user intends to transmit image data or other data to another user by operating a MFP, he/she selects a destination data piece from his/her own address book stored in the MFP.
However, it is not useful in the conventional practice, that a user owns address books only in MFPs in which he/she is registered as a user in advance, and cannot use his/her own address books by operating a MFP other than those.
To take a measure to resolve this, there is a suggested technology to make a server centrally administer respective users' address books and allow the users to use their own address books by operating any of the MFPs, and introduction of this technology is now being considered.
However, in this case, it takes a lot of work to manually migrate the address books stored in the plurality of MFPs, to the server.
According to Japanese Unexamined Laid-open Patent Publication No. H6-023734, there is a suggested technology to collect abbreviated dial information from a plurality of facsimile apparatuses to a host computer and create new abbreviated dial information by merging the collected abbreviated dial information by the host computer.
However, even if the address books stored in the plurality of MFPs are automatically migrated as referred to the above-mentioned publication and etc., it is not still useful that users have to classify them manually depending on the frequency of use, since all the destination data pieces registered in the address books are simply re-registered without consideration of the usage history of the destination data pieces.
The description herein of advantages and disadvantages of various features, embodiments, methods, and apparatus disclosed in other publications is in no way intended to limit the present invention. Indeed, certain features of the invention may be capable of overcoming certain disadvantages, while still retaining some or all of the features, embodiments, methods, and apparatus disclosed therein.